Schneider Electric is a global technology company specializing in energy management for software and services, including data centers and industrial automation. Founded in 1836, the company is headquartered in Paris and operates in over 100 countries. Those customers include Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
Situation analysis
The use of artificial intelligence continues to grow worldwide. Pankaj Sharma, executive vice president of data centers and networks at Schneider Electric, said the result will result in more data centers being built, increasing energy demand and increasing environmental impact.
The International Energy Agency estimates that by 2026, the AI industry will use about 10 times the electricity it consumed in 2023. As energy expands, data centers also face the challenge of incorporating cooling systems that increase energy efficiency and performance.
In December 2024, Schneider Electric announced a partnership with NVIDIA to develop tools to help data center operators address the energy and sustainability challenges associated with increasing use of AI. This includes planning to develop AI-focused energy and cooling strategies and AI infrastructure, as well as supporting data centers to help them achieve sustainability goals.
The partnership includes what Sharma calls the “data center reference architecture,” a framework that outlines the energy requirements and cooling systems needed to support data processing, business networks, data storage and other technologies. It also includes digital plans and real-time insights to help build new, energy-efficient data centers.
Sharma said the goal is to help businesses improve their digital infrastructure by establishing more sustainable, AI-enabled data centers.
Key staff and partners
Sharma told Business Insider that Schneider Electric had collaborated with Nvidia on the project. He said Schneider's technology team and data center engineers and architects worked closely with the NVIDIA technical team to develop and test the solutions to work together on the latest partnership. Executive leadership and business development teams were also involved.
Pankaj Sharma is executive vice president of data centers and networks at Schneider Electric. Provided by Schneider Electric
AI Action
Schneider Electric has co-developed a new data reference center design with Nvidia. This is a plan to build a new data center that supports high density AI clusters up to 132 kilowatts per data center server rack. A cluster is a network of servers that power AI, and a server rack is a structure that houses and organizes IT equipment.
According to Sharma, the baseline works with Nvidia's Superchips, designed for large-scale AI and high-performance processing. This project is built to support liquid cooling. This is a process that uses water or liquid coolants to absorb and remove heat from large computers and processing units.
Sharma said the new reference design is based on existing products from Schneider Electric and will help remove heat from the data center.
He said the latest designs developed at Nvidia will help Schneider Electric customers organize the development and construction of data centers that meet the energy and cooling challenges of the enterprise. Sharma added that the plan could be customized for the future in a more energy efficient and sustainable way to individual companies' requirements for AI workloads. He said the data center has already been built using designs created with NVIDIA.
“The intent of the design is not to build an actual, end-to-end replica of the design, but to use various aspects to inform customer initiatives and provide inspiration and guidance when needed,” Sharma said.
It worked, and how did the leader know?
Using virtual modeling and testing, Sharma said the reference design developed using NVIDIA will help the data center reduce cooling energy usage by around 20%. This plan will also help reduce the time it takes to design and build a new data center project by approximately 30%. This also saves businesses money and improves sustainability.
“It's not just speed, it's cost and sustainability,” Sharma said. “All of these works are advantageous for all customers.”
Shneider Electric will work with Nvidia to develop more reference designs over the next few years, Sharma said. The company is also working to design data centers and create infrastructure that can accommodate even higher levels of energy use. There are also cooling techniques needed to prevent overheating and management of energy consumption.
